Connecting with potential clients by telling your story in an engaging way through content marketing is the way to go today. It may not be easy to envision exactly how content marketing can work for you or what’s happening in the space. Here are some examples of great content marketing innovation and links to blogs and sites that can help you imagine and explore the boundaries of what you can create for your financial advisory practice via content marketing.

At the American Society of Journalists and Authors Conference last week, I learned about companies that are innovating in this space, including:

Coke: Last Fall, Coke relaunched it’s website as Coca-Cola Journey, a digital magazine. Instead of focusing on static branding and information, the site provides interactive info that tells the story of Coke via a variety of channels including bloggers offering thought leadership and a ton of cool content marketing in a variety of formats from video to social media to infographics. This interview with Ashley Brown, director of digital communications and social media for Coke, published by the Custom Content Council, focuses on Coke’s story and how it is told through the new site.

IMB: Midsize Insider is a digital interactive content site designed to offer information to small businesses about technology issues that affect them and potential solutions. IBM is not pushing it’s own products and instead has hired thought leadership bloggers in the space and journalists to tell it’s story. The site covers a number of topics in a variety of formats, including mobile, social business, cloud computing, business analytics and security.

Check these sites out and think about what they are doing — they are offering a wide variety of content in different formats. While your financial advisory business isn’t likely to have the ability to match the depth and breadth of these offerings, they are a good example of what can be done and may encourage you to think creatively and outside the box.

Yesterday I explored how a fundamental aspect of content marketing — storytelling — can benefit your financial advisory business. Alas, regardless of how compelling your story is, your efforts to reach your target audience will be stopped dead in their tracks if you can’t get it in front of them.

That’s where distribution comes in. And that’s why, even if you don’t have content ready to distribute, you need to get your distribution channels up and running. Here’s an overview of the major types of distribution channels and why they’re important:

Social media: Now that the compliance barriers are falling and more clients and potential clients than ever are on social media channels, there is really no excuse not to be there. That being said, not every channel is for every financial advisor. Some are more friendly to specific audiences and types of marketing than others. Facebook, for example, is a great way to connect with clients on a personal level and find out what their day-to-day concerns are. LinkedIn is the top professional network where you can find out about promotions and job changes. Twitter is the leading issues-oriented platform. There’s nothing wrong with picking one of these and focusing your efforts there for a while before broadening your approach. The one tool you must use, in my opinion, is blogging. More on that next week.

Website: To distribute content effectively, your website has to engage visitors and have the infrastructure to support that content. This includes the ability to create landing pages for specific types of content and gather information about visitors who want to read your content. You need someone — whether that is in your office or a contractor outside — who can create landing pages and help you gather the information you collect so that it resides in your client relationship management system (CRM)

Search Engine Optimization: Closely related to your website, you need to make it easy for potential clients, influencers and the media to find you. By using keywords and optimizing your site, content and social media, you can make it as painless as possible for people to find you and learn more about what you offer.

Email Marketing: Even if you aren’t engaged in content marketing yet, you likely have hundreds of email addresses, if not more, of clients and potential clients. E-mail marketing campaigns using the content you’re going to create are an extremely effective method for engaging with prospects and converting them into clients.

To get ready to engage with prospects via content marketing, do whatever you need to do to get your website upgraded and looking good, even if it’s just updating the copy to make sure it reflects what you do today. Keep tabs on Google analytics to see who is visiting your site when and check various search engine terms to see where you rank. Beef up your social media profiles or at least pick a platform and establish a presence if you aren’t there.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this series on content marketing with a look at helpful resources.

As the landscape for marketing changes inside and outside the financial services space, content marketing is becoming increasingly important in differentiating a brand and offering potential customers and clients the opportunity to interact with you, your company and your ideas before signing on.

I’ve been a convert to the content marketing philosophy for a while and am now even more convinced that it’s the way to go in the wake of attending the American Society of Journalist and Author’s Conference last week. The content marketing panels were excellent, and I learned about a number of companies, including IMB, Coke and Nike, that are pursuing innovation in this space.

The point of content marketing isn’t to sell potential clients on why they should hire you as their financial advisor. The point is to offer your thought leadership so you are perceived in the marketplace as an authority on specific issues who understands a specific client demographic and offers appealing solutions.

But for content marketing to be effective, it must tell a story. And that story must be framed by a well defined brand. The more specific the brand, the better the story.

When you focus in on an ideal client type and draw a very detailed picture of that client, that type of client is one that you know — or should know — inside and out. Typically, that client type is one that you know well and have interacted with for years, so you have the ability to understand their situation and offer tailored solutions to their problems and challenges.

What niche you occupy doesn’t really matter as long as you have one and it’s well defined. A recent slideshow in at financial-planning.com identified eight successful advisor niches; there are many more.

When work inside a very specific niche, creating a content marketing campaign is, or at least should be, a piece of cake. That’s because you know your audience so well that you can easily think of issues that concern them, which are exactly the areas that you should be creating blog posts, white papers, case studies, commentaries, articles and social media posts around.

When distributed widely and consistently, that kind of content will attract clients to you. It will also cut the conversion process because the clients who do get in touch will be doing so after they know something about you and are interested in learning more.

It’s exciting for me as a journalist with knowledge of the financial advisory space that content marketing is coming of age because it offers me so many opportunities to help my clients shape compelling narratives to help their clients and potential clients. That’s why they are in business in the first place — to help people achieve financial security.

In my blog posts this week, I’ll focus on other aspects of content marketing and how it can help you frame your story and attract clients to you. Stay tuned.

Advizent, the once-promising RIA marketing and branding consortium, was shut down last week by founders Steve Lockshin and Charles Goldman, Financial Planning magazine reports. They cited a lack of support from potential members and an unwillingness to take on outside capital as the reasons behind the decision to terminate the venture.

Sources quoted in this article and several others, including in RIABiz and Investment News, cite a number other reasons for the failure, including:

Unwillingness of RIAs to cooperate with each other

The high level of fees sought by the Consortium

Inability to provide a compelling ROI

Competition from other marketing and branding efforts

Lack of foresight in regarding to branding by RIAs

Advizent sought to create a marketplace that would match consumers with RIA firms, who would be rigorously pre-screened for ethics, compliance, succession planning, strategic planning and other characteristics. Consumers, attracted to the site via national marketing and advertising campaigns, would have been presented with Information about member firms and would have been matched with firms meeting their specific criteria.

I agree with some of the assessment in the articles exploring the reasons for the firm’s demise: for advisors to pony up the type of money that Advizent was seeking in return for a potential fuzzy pay off of consumers being directed to their firms via a website just wasn’t compelling enough. Then, there’s the fact that many advisory firms are far from sold on decent, let along large, budgets for marketing.

Add to the fact that RIAs are independent by nature and may have been wary of what they saw as a cookie cutter solution that didn’t stress individual differentiators enough, and the venture just didn’t have enough support in the industry to get off the ground.

I also believe that the venture ultimately didn’t succeed because this isn’t the best way for RIA firms to differentiate their brands, and RIAs sensed this. As I’ve written previously, in this day and age of fragmentation of the traditional media, advisory firms can best differentiate themselves via thought leadership targeted to a specific ideal client type. Savvy advisors are putting their marketing dollars into these kinds of content marketing campaigns and realize that they can best attract clients that will already meet their criteria — cutting the length and expense of the client acquisition cycle — by stressing their differentiators.

A pitch to the masses (even masses of high net worth investors) via a branded website isn’t what these firms need, and it wasn’t likely to generate enough business for member firms to justify the fees even if it did scale up and garner a decent following among consumers. Selling financial advice is becoming less and less like selling a car or a widget and Advizent’s nascent offering may have seemed too much like mass selling with too little potential for differentiation for member firms.

The evolution of the financial advisory industry is still in a very early phase. It’s too much like the Wild West for this type of consortium to succeed. The day may come when advisors — and consumers — will be more receptive to this type of branding model, but it’s a ways off.

When the SEC issues it’s yearly National Examination Guidelines detailing what its examiners will look for in audits of the more than 11,000 federally registered investment advisors and 800 investment companies, prudent advisors pay attention. While it’s unlikely that you’ll get examined if you fall into this category given the SEC’s limited resources, the guidelines are very informative in terms fo what issues regulators are paying attention to in any given year and how perceptions of risk are evolving in the financial advisory space.

As reported by Financial Planning magazine this morning, risk around conflict of interest is an ongoing priority for the Commission because conflicts of interest tend to arise constantly and change in nature. Examiners will be looking for specific conflicts of interest, what advisors are doing to mitigate and disclose those those conflicts, which can be particularly challenging for larger advisory firms. During examinations, staff will be analyzing financial and other records to identify compensation arrangements that aren’t being disclosed to clients, which may include:

Undisclosed fee or solicitation arrangements

Referral arrangements with affiliated entities

Receipt of payment for services allegedly provided to third parties

In terms of marketing, the SEC is looking at how advisors market, specifically around performance numbers. The SEC wants to ensure that all advertising of performance numbers is accurate, including that of hypothetical and back-tested performance and will look at assumptions and methodology, disclosures and compliance with record-keeping requirements.

The SEC’s other priorities in examinations include fraud detection and prevention, technology and corporate governance and enterprise risk management.

The take away for alert advisors? Analyze your practices and processes in these areas to make sure you meet or exceed the SEC’s standards. Talk to your team about potential conflicts of interest and make sure anything that even remotely might look like a conflict is disclosed to clients, whether it would draw a second look in an examination or not.

Whether you are likely to be audited or not, adopting best practices and evolving your practice to meet the highest standards possible is the best route to gain trust with your clients, potential clients, referral sources, employees and other stakeholders.